Ubuntu 9.10 beta now available

The latest version of the world’s most popular Linux distribution is now available. Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala continues the six-month development cycle of this free OS. We’ve used Ubuntu since 2005 and, after a short adjustment period, never looked back at those other operating systems.

Never used Linux? This distribution is for you but we recommend waiting until the release makes it out of beta to the stable version on October 29th.

Comfortable with Linux and want to get your feet wet? The Hack a Day team is calling on all of you to test, report, and improve upon this community driven project. Get yourself a copy of the beta (we recommend using the torrents) and start reporting bugs. You can help fix them by joining the bug squad, or use your coding skills to become a developer.

40 thoughts on “Ubuntu 9.10 beta now available”

Not a hack, not even news, cause everybody who cares knows that ubuntu 9.10 will be out in october, just like everyone who cares know that 10.04 will be out in april, and 10.10 will come in october of next year, surprise, surprise.

Not even a distro for people who actually used to hack something. I saw few of ubuntu headlines on hacka.. my homepage, and now I can tell for sure that it pisses me off. It’s a linux-based clone of windows, polished ‘cuz of its popularity and masses of beta-testers beyond IQ of 75 when it comes to PCs.
I rather see some more news about ARCH.linux, a really opensource one, if you really think you oughta have os-considering news in here.

You guys are idiots. Hackaday is not trying to impress you with their esoteric operating system knowledge, they are just trying to get more people to use Linux. I would have thought it was pretty obvious:

“Never used Linux? This distribution is for you but we recommend waiting until the release makes it out of beta to the stable version”

Oh, and yes, the release cycle is well-known… to people who already use Ubuntu. I don’t think they are the target when you are trying to get *new* Linux users.

You guys would do a lot more to help out opensource if you actually cared about spreading it rather than simply viewing it as tool to look down your noses at people. This blurb on hackaday is not an affront to your dignity. I’d rather read a dozen articles on arduino-based light switches than read your incessant whining.

ubuntu is a great os and how dare you call it a clone of windows because its nothing like windows if anything it reminds me more of osX and im glad they posted it because your all a bunch of retards and i got a good laugh reading your stupid post

2Insipid Melon
You’ve got a point there! But still it doesn’t look like a good way to spread oss tho. If I were new to uniz and stuff, I’d kinda be more interested in trying out linux by reading some article where it shows something I can’t do on win/mac machine, such as pentesting wifi networks, doing some weird stuff with hardware I already have inside my machine, you know… And really, not a beta of a distro where I won’t really need to config it in a ‘unix way’, you know… like editing sheet config files, looking where what goes, etc.
2Doom2099 && john g
Yea, it’s a debian-based system, which doesn’t really look like a linux system like it were few years ago. Popularity kills the first-source ideas of things – that’s my life’s expirience. You can go download openSuse, Ubuntu, Lime, etc. And all what you get is GUI-based system where you press buttons, and don’t really learn the system itself, you just can’t feel it. That’s why I dare comparing such ‘unix systems’ to windows – same feeling operating on it.
And when you get some real old-school software when you have to use “GCC(all linux distros have it) and a sh (or bash) terminal”, that’s when you start to really hack, not to read a papercut and press buttons.
I really respect people who stand behind developing of ubuntu for work they did, so do I respect you. But that’s not an os where you learn, that’s an os when you’ve learned and tired of consoles and compiling – you can find ANY package there, you just type it in and whoala! You don’t need to solve as much as you have to when it comes to ArchLinux. That’s when you really learn!

@markyb86:
zerost: i whine where i want to
first: all caps are always bad style and especially at hackaday, where they just got legalized because of some whiners.
second: goto is considered harmful. so no thanks, i won’t goto another blog.
@ other yellers:
could you lay off the idiot, stupid, retard, etc. and use arguments instead?

umm apple os is not based on linux. its based on unix and linux is also based on unix and sure ubuntu is not the geeky techy distro but that doesnt make it like windows its just easier to use for the general public but feels nothin like windows to me.

I was looking for the rls date before it was put here, I kind of assumed it would be the 22nd to match the win7 drop. All the pages I could find simply said oct, and finally found one that said the 29th.

I have mixed feelings about ubuntu. I tend to cripple/abandon all the systems I install. If it works out of the box it has a higher chance of being used regularly, instead of having to dual back into windows to accomplish some mundane task.

@physic.dude, I am pretty sure it will upgrade in place when it’s released, there may even be a way to upg to the beta now. I had 8.10, maybe 8.4 on my laptop, and it was too old to upgrade in place. [wasn’t following normal updates, because it fell into disuse, moot point now since the machine died last weekend… damn A/C condensation]

and to say you dont learn the system when using ubuntu isnt totally correct. alot of apps and games i use arent available in the package manager and have to be downloaded and installed thru terminal. and just wait till something quits working or you try to use sound. getting sound to work can sometimes be a daunting task. ubuntu is a great intro to the world of linux. you cant learn linux if you have no idea how to use it in the first place.

@tantris: The original title of the article by Dijkstra was: “A Case Against the Goto Statement” in which he argued that goto in *some* cases is harmful. Sadly, n00bs seem only to pick up the – edited by Niklaus Wirth – title and use it in their “smart ass” act on Usenet, forums, blogs, etc.

John Bokma wrote…“A Case Against the Goto Statement” in which he argued that goto in *some* cases is harmful.
*****

I always find that hilarious because this debate ONLY exists in the higher level languages because JMP statements(that’s the machine equivalent to “goto” for you non-programmers) are everywhere in assembly language and they have to be.

Ubuntu and my favourite Kubuntu which is Ubuntu with the KDE gui are really great distro’s of Linux. (I use Ubuntu too a lot)
Saying Ubuntu is crippled? Why? What makes it crippled? Their intention to make it usable for non IT specialist oriented people.

Linux is getting better than commercial Operating systems.
I think ubuntu and many other distro’s really have improved in the past 2-3 years. I remember buying Red hat 4 (5/6 Cd’s with a book) when I still was on highschool, it was a not intended for me back then! Windows 95/98 was far easier to work with.
But that has changed dramaticly.

Last saturday I visited friends to play some games (sigh, im no gamer) in VISTA!
Holycrap, about an entire evenig was lost due some odd network stack problem. The vista machine in question somehow performed an harakiri on it’s own network stack and took the entire OS with it when we tried to restore to a day before.
Hope Windows 7 will be better. Vista is keeping development & fun back in general!

PS: I have been using Dos&Windows for far too long, still do professionally. Using Linux now for 1.5 year privately and 0.5 years professionally.

I absolutely disagree with f.r0ze.n. People like him are the reason I didn’t get into Linux years ago.

Warning: Wall of text + full explanation.

I’ve had friends recommending I try Linux(Gentoo/Debian/Slackware) since early 2004 – but I never really got into it beyond installing then wiping it out. Why? It was just too damn hard to get anything done – and as an avid Windows XP GUI modder, my desktop makes me about 10 times more productive than most people running XP. Jumping to Linux – where I also have to learn all these text commands, and can’t just click to have a task complete instantly – seemed pointless.

But then I came across Ubuntu. Tried it in mid-2008, and it’s been great. It lets you learn in baby steps, as needed – and unlike other distros, you can instantly search Google for answers. No need to wait for hours in an IRC chat channel, or post on forums and get a reply in days or weeks. That makes it a great way to dive in, since you can get your answers NOW and continue on.

I’ve gone through versions 8.04, 8.10, and 9.04.

In 8.04 my resolution was set wrong, so I had to manually configure xorg.conf. I had a dedicated computer set up(VIA C7) for tinkering with. I tried to recompile my videocard drivers from source to improve stability, but that didn’t go so well. :) Learned a bunch about repositories and package management. I also had to locate a mixer program, because Ubuntu didn’t seem to come with one, and my default all sound was muted.

In 8.10 I learned a bit about conflicting packages (certain totem codec packages conflict with others) – my sound also broke, but later it started working again. The big thing in Ubuntu 8.10 was the new kernel corrupted my SATA HDD. Ubuntu was installed to a PATA one, but my storage drive went poof. Apparently libata got updated and it didn’t like my SATA controller, so bye bye data – total corruption! FSCK really screwed it up bad. I Learned quite a bit about formating and drivers during this fiasco. Afterwards I bought a PCI SATA controller to hook my drives up, and after being reformatted, they’re all okay. However, I had to manually configure fstab, which again was more learning. During this same time one of my other drives was failing, so I had to learn about smartctl and SMART tools. One PATA drive had 3000 errors recorded one day, and 6000 recorded the next – heh.

9.04 was definitely the best upgrade. I no longer required a manually configured xorg.conf. I also took some time to strip out extra packages, reducing Ubuntu to a lean 1085. ;) It significantly sped it up on my lowly C7. Before the package removal, though, I worked on converting my Ubuntu box to a Samba NAS. I got it set up to filter by IP, then restricted those IPs by MAC addresses in my router. A good learning experience, and it has worked fine to this day! However, when setting it up I faced the issue that Samba’s daemons often wouldn’t start after a reboot – some searching gave me the answer, that I needed a static IP for the daemon to reliably start up, and Ubuntu’s Network Manager didn’t provide that. In the end I was manually configuring /etc/resolv.conf and /etc/network/interfaces in order to get it to work.

If I had used any other distro, I would’ve faced even more issues at once, and ultimately gave up. But for Ubuntu, all the answers are right there on Google, so you never get discouraged or feel like it is *too difficult* – it may be pointlessly difficult, but you can still get a task done. ;) Ubuntu is solid enough that it *almost* works perfect, and once something breaks, you can dive in and learn about it. I really like Ubuntu – and now I know enough about Linux that I might try out Debian one day. That’s something that never would’ve happened if I had gone with another Linux distro first.

But I do owe Gentoo and Slackware Linux for something – my awesome XP Desktop. Never would’ve found the time to create it if Linux had sucked me in! But now I’m doomed – I like Ubuntu too much to not use it where possible.

Haha, “people like him”. That’s funny how you’re blaming somebody for your own regrets and wasted time.
The main reason why you “didn’t get into unix earlier” is probably because you’re weak and used to give up too fast (that’s what you described yourself in that boring 20-pages long wall of letters). I’ve seen people using mac for years but not knowing how to `cd` in console, and that’s “unix” and that’s “not windows” and ubuntu is leaning towards being an alternative to mac for ex-windows users.

Personally I got into linux by installing the most polished distro (OpenSUSE, because it looked pretty (that’s how I choose girls)), and wrecking it at least once a week by accident, then re-installing and trying again, learning on my mistakes.
That’s how you learn anything. Ubuntu and all the “ready-to-go” distros are fine, but only if you’re not a pussy to dig deeper into the system. Otherwise you’ll be one of those angry linux wannabe show-offs who tell everyone that they got linux, but knowing close to nothing about what it actually is in reality.

If it’s an OS for you, then off you go! If it’s not, why would you switch to it, while still using it as a proprietary OS? Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and probably Fedora are exactly of that kind — ready to go, but still unix-like.
This is a website for hardware hackers, you think we wouldn’t be able to work with tty1? Why would we need ubuntu if we know C/C++ and know how to compile tools or write our own?
It’s a shitty post and it’s talking about nothing… if you’re then you’re, if you’re not then you aren’t. End of the story.

Some like Linux to be complicated and only usable by them, this gives them elite like feeling.

Ubuntu is doing a good thing by just making Linux and OSS popular. Along with the devastation Vista brought to the image of Windows Linux really slowly, but steadily grows.

I started with Red Hat (before it was called Fedora) professionally and had to cross-compile our own Linux. When I look back at these days I learned a lot, but it was not fun at all.

Since Ubuntu 5.04 I used it and first I had a hard time because colleagues were using all sorts of Linux (Gentoo, Debian, …) and they were looking down at me for giving a user-friendly distro a try. After I had good success since I did not have to waste time on the base-system administration itself they stopped laughing and a few even silently switched to Ubuntu…

Anyway, bottom line is that I am convinced that a few people (I hope not too many) do not want Linux to be easy to use, because then suddenly they are not the clever geeks anymore…

I prefer to create something really new and work on new software/hacks etc. than to care for the desktop and stuff.

For instance a colleague had to waste half a day on his dual monitor setup (Arch), my Ubuntu just supported it properly out-of-the-box…

I went home on time that day, he did not get his work done that day :-P

people hating on the ubuntu posts: write a greasemonkey script to ignore them.

i’ve been a ubuntu user for 3 years or so– i made the switch on all of my machines at about the same time (laptop first, it ran great– then my desktop about a month later)

there is no reason why i don’t use another distro like arch except for the fact that if i were to sell a computer to a person that has never used a computer before, or has only used windows before– it would run ubuntu. i want to run what i would recommend my clients run.

i’ve converted all kinds of non-geeks over to ubuntu over the years, most of them even refuse to have a windows partition as a “backup”

i’ve been using ubuntu since 2005 and not turned to any other flavor (using linux since 1998 including suse, mandrake, debian). must say it’s user friendly.
the point why these alpha and beta’s should be posted here is because hackaday people can provide help in polishing the rough edges to a solid release for the ‘general public’.
hackaday wouldn’t exist if there was a 100% perfect OS tailored to each user’s need.. they would be out of a job :)
point is, by helping end users solve problems to make their computer behave like they want it to behave, hackers provide a way out of the propriatary loop of OS’s that ‘just work – don’t try to tinker’ and ‘doesn’t work – but we’re your only choice’.
ubuntu is neither of the above. we all have to put an effort in making linux work for as much people as possible. i’ve yet to meet the first hacker who doesn’t want to share his solution to a problem. all of us are going through a learning process. main stream users and hackers alike.
let’s give each other a bit of slack (no pun intended :)